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The pharmacology of ethanol involves both pharmacodynamics (how it affects the body) and pharmacokinetics (how the body processes it). In the body, ethanol primarily affects the central nervous system, acting as a depressant and causing sedation, relaxation, and decreased anxiety.
The removal of ethanol (drinking alcohol) through oxidation by alcohol dehydrogenase in the liver from the human body is limited. Hence the removal of a large concentration of alcohol from blood may follow zero-order kinetics. Also the rate-limiting steps for one substance may be in common with other substances.
Alcohol detoxification is a process by which a heavy drinker's system is brought back to normal after being habituated to having alcohol in the body continuously for an extended period of substance abuse. Serious alcohol addiction results in a downregulation of GABA neurotransmitter receptors.
Clearance of a substance is sometimes expressed as the inverse of the time constant that describes its removal rate from the body divided by its volume of distribution (or total body water). In steady-state, it is defined as the mass generation rate of a substance (which equals the mass removal rate) divided by its concentration in the blood.
The other elimination pathways are less important in the elimination of drugs, except in very specific cases, such as the respiratory tract for alcohol or anaesthetic gases. The case of mother's milk is of special importance. The liver and kidneys of newly born infants are relatively undeveloped and they are highly sensitive to a drug's toxic ...
“When alcohol is metabolized, it produces acetaldehyde, a toxic compound that damages DNA and impairs the body’s ability to repair this damage,” says Andrews. “This DNA damage can set the ...
Drug metabolism is the metabolic breakdown of drugs by living organisms, usually through specialized enzymatic systems. More generally, xenobiotic metabolism (from the Greek xenos "stranger" and biotic "related to living beings") is the set of metabolic pathways that modify the chemical structure of xenobiotics, which are compounds foreign to an organism's normal biochemistry, such as any drug ...
“Alcohol is toxic to a lot of organ systems in the body," Oesterle says. "It can affect the liver, pancreas, heart and the nervous system, just to name a few.